


you'll find your way home

by orphan_account



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Crushes, Multi, OT4, Pining, Polyamory, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-11
Updated: 2015-01-31
Packaged: 2018-02-08 09:47:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1936293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are a lot of things that don’t make sense to Bucky these days. Things like sex, and friendship, and basic notions of personhood.</p><p>Sometimes it pays to enlist a little extra help.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The working title of this fic was “the one where Bucky reclaims his sexuality through flagrant polyamory and lots of pining”. Accordingly, it is not exactly a _grim_ story, but please be aware that the following content does appear at various points: **violence; PTSD, dissociation and general mental unwellness; dehumanisation, implicit torture and medical horror**.
> 
> A million thanks to Vorvayne for the tireless beta work, and to ladylapislazuli for the editing consult and all the late nights hurling headcanons at each other.

In the early days, everything comes in flashes. From moment to moment the boundaries of his identity shift, so that sometimes he is James Buchanan Barnes (sergeant 107th 32557038 _with you til the end of the line_ ) and sometimes he is the Soldier (two targets confirmed death 10 hours mission compromised _wipe and start over_ ) and sometimes he is neither and sometimes, on the worst days, he is both.

He is never alone. Some days it’s Steve who supervises him, calling him ‘Buck’ and hovering in doorways and smiling at every move he makes. Sometimes it’s Sam, who keeps up a slow stream of idle chatter and brings him food but never instructs him to eat it. Sometimes it’s Natasha, who speaks to him in Russian and English and keeps a knife concealed in her boot at all times. All of this is normal - he is used to being handled. 

There are other times when they work in pairs, or as a unit. Sometimes Sam stands behind Steve on the couch and kneads his shoulders, leaning close to murmur in his ear. Sometimes Natasha sits in Sam’s lap and kisses her way from his palm to the inside of his wrist. All of this is normal - he knows about sex, in much the same way he knows about bullet trajectories and Hydra’s safehouse network and the typical flight patterns of a hunted target.

On good days, when his head is clear and ‘friendship’ carries the first flickers of meaning in his mind, he stays alert for the thumps and moans and murmurs that echo quietly from their room after he has been sent back to his. Then he slips back down the hall and takes vantage point by the sheltered living room window until they fall quiet again. All of this is normal - humans are vulnerable during sex, stripped of both their guard and their armour, like fish in a barrel to an experienced hunter (he knows this).

If they are eliminated, he will have nowhere to go. So he pays attention. Guards their vulnerable moments. The rest is of no interest to him - everything is normal.

 

 

The first time he registers this particular new feeling is on a cold, rainy night under the supervision of the whole unit. Cold nights are bad nights: wordlessly, Steve has turned the heating up to full, and Sam has brought out spare blankets to drape around his shoulders as he huddles at his window vantage point.

Natasha is here tonight, balancing a stack of pizza boxes in one hand and a stack of DVDs in the other. He watches, mute, as they settle down on the three-seater couch, and thinks that the elevated heating explains the pink tinge to Natasha’s cheeks; it doesn’t explain how close the three of them are leaning, or the casual caress of her hands on Steve and Sam’s thighs, or how low Steve’s hand is resting around behind her back.

And nothing explains why this particular cluster of meaningless observational data should provoke such a strange, warm ache inside him. It doesn’t explain the sudden sensation of distance, of absence, the _needy_ feeling that doesn’t quite mean ‘damage sustained’ and doesn’t quite mean ‘sustenance required’ and definitely doesn’t mean ‘target acquired’. _Definitely_ doesn’t, even though the images flashing unbidden through his mind involve all three of them in a state of perfect vulnerability, unarmed and unguarded and utterly exposed.

“You okay there, Barnes?” Natasha’s hands have stopped moving; everyone is looking at him, tense and suddenly cautious. He becomes aware that the edge of the windowsill is starting to splinter in his left hand’s grip, and his body is rigid, poised as if to spring.

He shrinks back, loosens his grip, pulls his blankets back close around him.

Steve’s eyes are the first to soften. “Hey, Buck, it’s okay. Everything’s okay. Nothing to be scared of.”

“How about you come in closer to the heater?” says Sam, hitching an encouraging smile onto his face. “I’ll guard that window there for a while, if you like.”

The warmth of the radiator does help ease the tight coil in his chest, but it doesn’t do much for his confusion. He presses in close until he can smell the blankets start to singe, and concentrates on easing his hands out of their tight fists. He rests one on his own thigh - gently, like he saw Natasha do - but the sensation from before doesn’t repeat itself.

 

 

There are dreams, of course.

Snow. Blood. Concrete. There are nights when he can _feel_ the trigger beneath his finger, can taste the fear in the air around him as he marches forward with single-minded purpose. The voiceless sobs of a tiny child, struck dumb with terror as it cowers behind the bodies of its fallen parents. The smell of burning rubber as a car goes plummeting over a cliff. A nameless man, urine seeping through the front of his crisp black suit, whimpering as he offers up fistfuls of banknotes that will make no difference. A woman who makes it fifty yards on a bullet-torn leg before succumbing to pursuit. An elderly man who never makes it up out of his rocking chair.

(“Kill confirmed,” he chokes desperately into his hands, and Natasha sits quietly beside him in the dark and strokes his hair back from his clammy forehead until the tremors subside.)

Sometimes the dreams are quieter, gentler, and he curls himself around the phantom presence of a tiny little body with rattling lungs and a warm, familiar scent. There’s a smiling woman who offers him seconds from the pot on the stove, and a man with a stern face and kind eyes who peers at him over the rim of his newspaper. He follows Steve down dingy Brooklyn alleyways, peels him off the pavement with gentle, uncalloused hands. He follows Steve through crowds of reporters with their flashing cameras, and through crowds of enemy soldiers with their blazing guns. He cocks his rifle, feels the warm satisfaction of a shot well made.

Then there are other nights, nights he doesn’t understand, nights when Steve’s breath comes hot and ragged in his ear and his mind is a blur of sensations that he can’t identify as either memory or fiction. There are nights when he replays the echoes that come from behind closed doors when Steve and Sam and Natasha are all together, until his sleep is so disrupted that he gives up and rises early to pace away the tension knotting low in his gut.

He feels...something, on those nights. Something that isn’t distress or damage but also isn’t comfort, and it leaves his skin feeling too tight and far too hot.

The only conclusion he can reach is that the feeling is some new kind of malfunction. He’s used to malfunctions, because a lot of them have been emerging since he left Hydra. Steve says it’s a natural part of the healing process, and there’s no need to feel worried about the days when he can’t bring himself to talk or the nights when he wakes up screaming or the mornings when there’s a knife in his hand and he doesn’t know how it got there.

Obviously this new experience - this tight, burning feeling that comes and goes on a schedule of its own - is something similar. So he doesn’t worry about it.

Perhaps Steve has noticed his increased restlessness, though, because it’s not long after the episodes start before Steve is ordering a new training regime ( _suggesting_ , Buck, _suggesting_ , it’s not an order). They head out before daybreak, when only a handful of dedicated joggers are sharing the streets, and the cold air doesn’t bother Bucky as much as usual when he’s allowed to keep moving through it. It’s actually...advantageous, he thinks. The breeze keeps the sweat from drenching him and the darkness hides his face and the quiet gives him ample warning of other approaching joggers.

“You look happy,” Steve says when they finally pull up back in their own front yard. Soft grey light is starting to bleed across the sky. Bucky’s cheeks are flushed and the lights are on inside, where he can hear Sam rattling about with the coffee machine.

“Happy,” Bucky echoes, because Steve is watching him closely and seems to be expecting an answer. Bucky knows happy - they’ve talked about this before. Satisfaction, contentment, a pervasive sense of wellbeing. The feeling of a mission completed with perfect efficiency, the feeling of getting warm again after being cold. He is still unused to recognising it inside himself.

At the very least, he’s confident some of the tension within him has eased.

Breakfast is on the table when they head indoors. Normally Sam accompanies Steve on his morning jogs, but he took some damage last week on a mission Bucky isn’t allowed to know about and he’s still limping. Steve greets him with a squeeze of his hand a brisk smile. “Went well,” he says.

“I’ll bet.” Sam gives them both an easy grin and places two towering plates of pancakes on the table. “First time you’ve been out in a while, huh, Barnes? How’d you find it?”

Bucky watches the pancakes carefully, waiting in silence for permission. Steve clears his throat. “He liked it, didn’t you, Bucky? Could hardly keep up with him once he got going.”

Sam snorts. “Now that I’d pay to see,” he says, and punches Steve lightly on the shoulder. “C’mon, eat up, both of you. It’s not easy getting together enough food for a pair of goddamn super soldiers.”

Bucky eats quickly, hungry from the run, but he finds his eyes drifting towards Steve and Sam and how close they’re sitting, and the way Steve’s hand keeps coming down between bites to rest almost carelessly on Sam’s thigh.

And the tension he’s only just burnt off is starting to come back.

 

 

His new handlers talk about ‘want’ so freely that it never occurs to him to question it. It is, he assumes, their particular trick for issuing orders that don’t sound like orders: _Do you want to eat now, Bucky? Want to come down from the roof yet? Want to watch some TV with us?_ But then there’s the day when Steve casts a glance over his shoulder from the kitchen and says, “What do you want for dinner tonight?” and the question pulls him up so hard that there’s nothing he can do but stare at Steve in silence, racking his brains as he tries to figure out the motive and significance of the question.

“Uh, Bucky?” Steve stops rattling around in the pantry to come over to the couch, a bag of dried pasta still clutched in his hand. “You okay there, pal?”

He takes a moment to consider this; the furrow in Steve’s brow deepens with every second the silence drags on. “Yeah,” he says, and then, “I don’t understand.”

Steve chuckles. It’s an awkward, forced chuckle that means he doesn’t know how else to respond. “Dinner,” Steve repeats. “What do you want to eat? I was thinking I could knock up some spaghetti bolognese, or…”

With this solid, mercifully specific suggestion, they’re back on solid ground. He lets out a soft sigh and releases his grip on the arm of the couch. “Spaghetti bolognese,” he echoes.

He thinks that’s the end of it. But Steve only gets halfway through peeling a clove of garlic before he looks up again, thoughtful frown already re-forming on his face. “What do you mean, you don’t understand?”

Bucky doesn’t know how to answer this, so he doesn’t. Steve persists. “Look, I know some of this stuff is still confusing to you...” Bucky nods, though he’s unsure exactly what he’s agreeing to. “You know you’re allowed to have opinions, right? Even over small stuff, I mean…” Steve gestures hopelessly at the kitchen. “If there’s something you want to eat, something you want to do or not do, you should speak up. You don’t just have to agree with whatever I say - you’re allowed to want stuff on your own.”

There it is again. Bucky blinks at Steve, feeling the rusty gears in his brain crunch and squeal as he tries to figure out how to express his problem. “I don’t...want things,” is the best he can manage, with a small grimace.

For a moment it looks like he’s made a mistake. Steve’s frown is deepening, and his hands twitch as though longing to reach out - or lash out, perhaps. But his face softens when he meets Bucky’s gaze again. “Sure you do,” he says.

“No, I don’t.” He’s never needed to. Wouldn’t know how to.

“I think you do.” The couch sags beneath him as Steve sinks down onto it. “Think about that hoodie you’re wearing. We bought you a few different choices, but you always wear that one whenever it’s not in the wash. Even if it’s out on the line and there’s another one waiting in your drawer, you’ll go outside and get that one. It’s not a strategic choice to make, so why do you do it?”

The gears crunch some more as Bucky considers this. He’s not sure exactly where it’s going or why it matters, but Steve is wide-eyed and earnest at his side. And the truth is that, now he thinks about it, there’s no meaningful difference between the various hoodies he can choose from. They’re all the right size, all in muted colours that don’t draw too much attention. The one he’s wearing now is a soft grey; it zips up at the front, and has two deep pockets which he buries his hands in and a drawstring around the neck which he doesn’t use. And it feels, for no particular reason, like a better choice than the others.

“You do it because you _want_ to wear that one,” says Steve. “You like wearing the same hoodie every day because you like having a routine. You like having things happen the same way as they did yesterday, even if there are other equally good options available. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about when I ask if you want something. I’m asking what makes you feel good, regardless of function or strategic value.”

Bucky nods. “Bolognese,” he says, because this conversation is exhausting and it’s the best he can do verbally right now. There’s a lot to process. He thinks about the spot he always chooses in front of the heater, the enormous pile of blankets he keeps on his bed, the strange animated movies Natasha sometimes brings with her when she stops by the house.

He thinks about the three of them, Steve and Sam and Natasha, nestling together on the couch and stealing food from each other’s plates while he watches the movies play from his spot in front of the heater. 

Wanting. Liking. Feeling good, regardless of function or strategic value.

There’s a lot to process.

Steve sighs and hauls himself back up off the couch. “That’s the spirit,” he says, and Bucky doesn’t stop watching him as he goes back to peeling garlic and onions in the kitchen. He watches the way Steve’s brows furrow and the way his mouth twists into an agitated line, and it occurs to him - a stray thought, issuing straight from one of the ever-present blank spaces in his mind - that Steve hasn’t said anything about what _he_ wants.

 

 

“Seventy years, Sam.” Steve’s voice is quiet and strained, only barely audible from the hallway outside where Bucky sits hunched against their bedroom door. “Seventy years he’s spent not even knowing he can _want_ stuff, and somehow we’ve gotta help him put that back together?”

The blankets rustle; Bucky can imagine Sam rolling over to wrap an arm around Steve (Steve likes that when he’s upset, though Bucky doesn’t know how he knows). “We’re getting there,” says Sam. “ _He’s_ getting there. Remember when we first found him, how messed up he was then? It’s gonna take some time, but the guy’s already making leaps and bounds. All you did today was help him make another one.”

A short lull follows. There’s something reassuring about the sound of their even breathing, about the slow creaking of the bed as they shift their weight around to get comfortable. It’s more comfortable here on the floor than it is back in Bucky’s bed, but it doesn’t take long for the sounds to become less soothing: there’s a louder rustle, another creak and a soft sigh from Steve, then some more rustling and a bitten-off _moan_ that jolts Bucky right back out of his relaxed sleepiness.

He ends up abandoning his station by the door and heading out to the living room, to his usual vantage point just out of view from the window overlooking the street.

At some point, he dozes off.

 

 

“Steve and I used to have sex.”

It’s taken him a while to reach the decision. There was nothing about it at the Smithsonian, nothing in any of the books he’s read or the stories Steve has told him. No evidence whatsoever to corroborate the disjointed images that swirl in his head whenever he thinks about it. But he knows, once, he used to be a person; it makes sense to assume that he did all kinds of person things back then, including sex. And he doubts it was Hydra who implanted him with memories of what Steve would look like stretched out naked on an old cot bed beneath him, skin golden in the early morning glow, head tilted back and mouth slack with pleasure.

He tries not to dwell on the memories - they elevate his pulse, leave him with that hot, restless, aching feeling that keeps coming back at unexpected moments. It’s been several days, now, since he slept more than a couple of hours at a time. He’s decided that getting confirmation will make it easier for the memories to settle in his mind, so he doesn’t keep waking up sweating and full of that same unfamiliar tension each time his sleeping brain replays them.

He waits patiently as Sam starts, then swears, then snatches for a dishrag to mop up his spilt cocoa. “Man, you’d think I’d be used to it by now,” he mutters, before turning to face Bucky’s shadowy corner with a good-natured smile fixed firmly in place. “Didn’t realise you were still up, Barnes. Come again?”

“Steve and I,” Bucky repeats slowly. “We used to have sex.”

“This a new memory?” Sam asks, and Bucky nods once. “Yeah, Steve’s told me you guys used to have a pretty steady thing going during the war.”

“I don’t remember much,” says Bucky. “But I know there was sex. And another woman, one time.” He frowns, tries to pick out the details of the blurred emerging memories. “Without me then, I think. But before that…”

Sam’s brows are furrowed. “Has this been bothering you?” he asks. “Because you know, I’m sure Steve would be happy to talk-”

“No.” Bucky shakes his head, purses his lips. It’s not...Steve doesn’t need to talk. These aren’t talking memories, he decides all at once, and turns to make his retreat.

But Sam pulls him up with a gentle hand on his shoulder. For a moment it alarms him, and then it reminds him of the way Sam’s hands sometimes rub Steve’s shoulders, and he feels a sharp spike in the tension still roiling inside him from when he woke up this morning with a heat-haze of images shimmering in his mind. “Hey,” Sam says, “we won’t talk to Steve if you don’t want to. But this is a big thing for you to try and process all alone.” He takes his hand off Bucky’s shoulder - Bucky tries not to grimace at the loss - and gestures at the breakfast bar where his late-night oatmeal  is going soggy. “Why don’t we sit down and have a chat?”

There are purplish teeth marks peeking out from the collar of Sam’s running shirt. “You and Steve,” Bucky says, taking his seat. “The two of you have sex now.”

“Yeah,” says Sam, straddling the seat next to him in a way that doesn’t make Bucky feel any more relaxed. “Yeah, we’re having sex.” His expression is neutral but his eyes are raking over Bucky’s face, looking for some kind of tell. “Is that gonna be a problem?”

Bucky blinks. He tries to think of any way that Steve and Sam having sex could pose a problem for him, any strategic disadvantage it could create, but there’s nothing. “No,” he says flatly.

He doesn’t mention the aching feeling when he wakes up from his dreams, or the way his skin heats up when he thinks too long about the memories. Doesn’t mention it, but Sam is still looking at him as though waiting for something else to come out. “Sometimes I can’t sleep through it,” he adds, mostly to break the silence.

Sam’s starting to look embarrassed - uncharacteristic, for him. “Wow, uh...sorry, dude,” he says. “Never realised you could hear us that well.”

“I have enhanced hearing,” Bucky explains, and shrugs. He doesn’t address the apology - doesn’t understand it. “But I…” The words are sticking on the tip of his tongue, gears grinding away in his brain as he tries to articulate the question he’s only just realised he has. “I don’t get why,” he admits.

To his credit, Sam is pulling himself together very quickly; already his expression is relaxing. “You’re not talking about the enhanced hearing, are you.”

Bucky shakes his head. “I know how it works, I know it’s important to people, I just. Can’t remember _why_ I used to do it. Or why it matters when _you_ do it.”

Sam whistles through his teeth. “You know what,” he says, “that’s the first time you’ve come out with something I honestly haven’t heard before.” At Bucky’s frown, he lapses into a thoughtful silence. “Okay, how do I put this...remember that talk you and Steve were having about wanting things?” Bucky nods. “Well, sex is one of those things lots of people do just ‘cause they want to. Do you…” Sam pauses, swallows. He’s starting to squirm a bit again, though he’s making an effort to hide it. “Would you say you have much of a sex drive, these days?”

“How can I tell?”

Sam’s face falls dramatically. “I need backup,” he mutters, and takes a morose mouthful of his oatmeal. “I think I’m doing this the wrong way. How about you tell me how you feel, when you think about these new memories of yours?”

It takes Bucky a long moment to gather his thoughts together on this, but not as long as it might have - it’s been on his mind a lot recently. “Tense,” he says. “Hot. Restless. Like I…”

“Like you really want something you’re not getting?” Sam supplies. Bucky nods.

“Alright then,” says Sam, and the embarrassment is gone now. He’s watching Bucky with a strange, soft-eyed expression. “I think what you’re gonna need is some alone time. Yeah, I know -” he fends off Bucky’s confused stare with a wave of his hand - “you don’t know what that means either. When you’re feeling up to it, all you gotta do is run yourself a nice hot bath and lie back in the water and try touching yourself. Anywhere you like - just focus on where all that tension is concentrated and touch yourself there.” Sam casts him a lopsided grin. “You’ll probably figure it out pretty quick after that.”

Clear instructions are something Bucky is good at. They’re familiar, reassuring. He...likes them, he decides. So he takes Sam’s advice and runs a bath. He strips off and lowers himself into the water, but something inside him feels...tense, in a different and unexpected way. Nervous. He closes his eyes and lies back, focuses on his breathing like Steve has taught him to do in anxious moments. Last night, he dreamed that Steve’s breath came in gasps and sobs. The ground beneath them was hard and bare, and he remembers his hand clamped over Steve’s mouth to help muffle the sounds.

(In his dream, the hand he used was flesh-and-blood. The whirring metal reality of it now would chip Steve’s teeth if he used it like that - would crush his jaw, if Bucky lost focus.)

It takes time. For feelings that have been dominating such a large part of his mind, they’re hard to grasp now that he’s looking for them. Steam-damp hair hangs in front of his eyes and the tension inside him is still there, inches out of reach.

In his dream last night, he was crawling through thick bracken as gunfire tore the air around him. He watched Steve charge across an open clearing as bullets ricocheted off his shield, watched a dozen men fall between his crosshairs, watched the world go up in smoke and shrapnel and arcing spurts of blood. (He squeezes his eyes shut tighter, breathes heavily through his nose. The tiles beneath his fingers are starting to crack.)

They’re the wrong memories. Focus on the tension, Sam told him. The hot water is slow to help him relax, but as it gradually does its job he drags his mind back to where it’s supposed to be. Steve. Hard, bare ground beneath them. A flesh-and-blood hand clamped over Steve’s mouth.

Steve’s hands, hot and urgent, stroking across his chest. (He follows the path with his own hands, erratic but harmless, and his left hand is so much colder and harder than Steve’s in the dream.) His thigh pressing between Steve’s legs, parting them, and the hard length of Steve’s erection grinding up against him. (The tension is starting to come back in earnest now.)

He wants...he wants. Everything feels tight and hot and the memories are starting to darken at the edges, and he wants. His nerve endings are crackling with sensation - pulsing, electric. Bucky knows all about things that feel electric. A deep, shuddering breath. A sharp pang of apprehension.

He keeps going because he has to, now, because this is the task he’s been given and he needs to see it through. Steve’s hand dipping lower, caressing his stomach - Bucky follows the motion and feels the taut muscles clench beneath his fingers. Dimly he’s aware that that he’s breathing too quickly - that he’s starting to sweat, whether from anxiety or the heat of the water or something else entirely. Steve’s hand travelling lower still, tracing the dark line of hair from his navel, wrapping around his dick, and he’s swollen and hard to the touch and sensitive and -

- _oh_. He remembers. He remembers.

He remembers.

It lasts barely a dozen strokes of his hand. The tension inside him builds so fast and so intensely that remembering becomes irrelevant, and all he can do is curl jerkily in on himself and bite his lip to muffle the sounds that spill from his mouth as everything inside him explodes all at once. His muscles clench and spasm like he’s back in the chair, but the feeling coursing through him is the _opposite_ of the chair and and when it’s over he feels blank, breathless, pressing his forehead against the cool tile wall beside the bathtub and panting like he’s been running for hours.

For a while he doesn’t think, doesn’t move, doesn’t try to process anything. His eyes feel wet so he scrunches them closed, lies back in the water, lets the rapid pounding of his heart anchor him back down to a body that feels...different, now. It’s been decades since he has been in any doubt about the extremes of pain he’s capable of enduring. This is a different kind of extreme, one he didn’t even remember he could feel, and that fact is only the latest in a list of betrayals that he feels he may never reach an end to.

But for a while, he doesn’t have to think. Doesn’t have to move or try to process anything. For now it’s enough just to breathe, and let the warmth of the water suck the chill from his bones, and enjoy the fading satisfaction of a task accomplished and the fading release of tension in his trembling body.

 

 

Later, when the water has cooled almost completely and the steam has cleared from the air, Sam comes to check on him. “You decent in there?” he calls out, rapping lightly on the door.

“Yeah,” Bucky calls back automatically. He’s starting to get cold, but somehow he can’t bring himself to get out of the water. He hugs his legs a little closer and waits quietly for Sam to settle down on the rim of the bath before speaking.

“You know,” Sam says cheerfully, “when I asked if you were decent, that was actually shorthand for ‘do you have your clothes on’.”

“Oh.” Bucky grimaces. “I left my stuff in the bedroom,” he says. “I can get it -”

“We’re cool.” Sam casts him a reassuring smile and it’s an expression he’s seen dozens of times before, but this time there’s something else behind it that he can’t quite get a read on. Something that reminds him a little bit of Steve, though he’s not sure why. “I just wanted to make sure you were okay,” says Sam. “You’ve been in here a long time. Must be getting cold by now.”

“Yeah.” Now that Bucky thinks about it, he doesn’t _know_ how long he’s been in here. Doesn’t know what he’s been thinking about the whole time, either. His head is a lot quieter than it usually is. He’s been...feeling, rather than thinking. Noticing the way the water laps against his bare skin, noticing the quiet whirring sound his left arm makes when it flexes, noticing the crinkling of his right-hand fingers as they soak.

Sam is rising to his feet now, snatching up the clean towel from the hook on the door. “Come on, then,” he says, and holds it out invitingly. “You know you don’t feel too great when you start getting cold, Barnes.”

He knows. And that hollow, jittery feeling still isn’t creeping up on him yet, but he climbs out of the tub anyway and wraps the towel tight around himself.

“So...you figure some stuff out?” Sam asks as Bucky starts towelling his hair dry. He’s clearly not here to supervise - he’s not even looking at Bucky, just gazing around the room like he’s not quite sure where to put his eyes - but he doesn’t show any signs of leaving, either.

“Yeah.” He doesn’t know what exactly the stuff is, yet. But it’s definitely something.

“Good. That’s good, man.” Bucky’s nearly dry, and Sam is now starting to turn towards the door, but he pauses with his hand on the doorknob and finally turns to look at Bucky properly. “That’s all yours, you know,” he says.

“The towel?”

Sam chuckles. “Your body,” he corrects. “I was thinking about that, after you got in the bath. Realised you probably still don’t have your head around that. But all these feelings you got, the ones you don’t know what to do with yet - all of that belongs to you.” He’s looking Bucky straight in the eye, and Bucky can feel something twisting in his stomach. It’s a strange, light, fluttery feeling that probably belongs right at the top of the list Sam is talking about. “I know that wasn’t how it was back with Hydra, but that’s how it’s gonna be now. Nobody else ever gets to own you except yourself. And if you need help figuring out what that means sometimes, I’m always gonna have your back.” He grins then, and the intense, serious expression is gone all at once, and he squeezes Bucky’s shoulder briefly before making his exit and pulling the door shut behind him.

“Even if it means I have to teach you how to jerk it at three o’clock in the goddamn morning,” he hears from outside in the corridor.

 

 

Things get easier after that.

He can’t really explain what’s changed. He’s not tense in the same way, any more, and there’s something grounding about being able to identify and address his body’s needs independently instead of wallowing in nameless frustration. He feels present, far more anchored in his own identity than he used to be, and the days when he’s the Soldier are almost gone and the days when he’s nobody in particular are getting less frequent.

It’s just him and Steve and Sam for the next couple of weeks - Natasha, they tell him, is away on another of those missions he’s not allowed to know about. In the mornings he goes out running with them, and he and Steve lap Sam around the National Mall. The first time he tries out Steve’s routine - a brisk “on your left” along with his best attempt at a grin as he passes - Sam and Steve both stop to stare at him in disbelief, and then Sam launches into a litany of curses while Steve laughs so hard he nearly falls in the lake. It’s a good day, and he likes watching Steve smile and he likes the way Sam thumps him on the back when he drops into a slow jog beside him on the last lap.

Other things he likes - and he’s keeping a list in his head, just in case - include the slow, soulful music Sam likes to play when he cooks or cleans around the house, and the satisfied grin Sam gets when he’s got Steve tucked under his arm on the couch, and the fact that Sam touches him so easily and freely, clapping his shoulder and squeezing his arm like he’s not even dangerous. He finds his eyes drawn to Sam when he’s around, finds himself noticing how fluid his movements are when he runs and how animated his face is even when he’s not talking.

Once again, he finds himself in the position of wanting something he can’t find a name for. Because he _does_ want - there’s no other word that adequately describes the warm, fluttery feeling in his stomach whenever Sam turns his friendly grin on him. Without entirely understanding why, he starts looking for ways he can get Sam to smile more often: handing him things when he needs them (and occasionally when he doesn’t), making coffee for him in the mornings (he’s learned to use the machine by watching the others do it) and, on one accidental but memorable occasion, knocking Steve into the pond as they race to be the first to overtake Sam on their morning run (Sam has to stop running for nearly ten minutes while he pulls himself together).

Natasha shows up again late one evening to find the three of them scattered comfortably around the living room. Steve’s sketching something over at the corner desk and Sam’s stretched out on the couch reading a book. Bucky’s on the floor in front of the heater, watching: watching the infomercial that’s playing on the TV, watching Steve’s hand fly across the page, and especially watching Sam as he darts his tongue out and licks his finger to turn each page, a small frown of concentration playing on his face.

“You boys save me any dinner?” she calls from the kitchen, and grins mischievously when Sam and Steve jump startled to their feet; Bucky, who heard her muffled entry through the back door, stays put and quietly assesses the situation from his spot on the floor. She’s still in her work gear, which is dirty and scuffed in places, but Natasha herself looks undamaged. When she glances over at him, he manages a small, stiff smile.

“Thought I’d crash here for a while,” she says, sauntering over to the couch and sliding straight into Sam’s spot. Sam doesn’t miss a beat, just falls back on top of her with a wry twist of his mouth. The scuffle that ensues is short-lived and ends with Natasha sprawled triumphantly in Sam’s lap and Sam’s arms draped around her waist and Bucky, still curled up in front of the heater, frowning at them both as he struggles to understand what the sudden pang of feeling inside him means.

He overhears them later, as he’s burrowing his way into the nest of blankets on his bed. “So, you and Barnes,” Natasha is saying from out in the kitchen. “Something happen while I was away?”

“Not really,” Sam says easily. “He’s been doing well these past couple of weeks. Joking with me and Steve. Hardly any nightmares. We’re getting on great.”

“I can see that - he hasn’t taken his eyes off you all evening,” says Natasha. “I can’t tell whether he’s planning to ask you out or shoot you.”

Sam chuckles, low in his throat. “You jealous?”

“Hey, I’m just saying,” says Natasha. “I leave you alone for a fortnight, and when I come back you’ve got the _Winter Soldier_ making soppy eyes at you. This is the exact same thing that happened with you and Steve. You’re like the pied piper of emotionally compromised 1940s supersoldiers.”

“Shut up, Romanoff,” says Sam. There’s no real bite in his tone. “How ‘bout you save the wedding speech til _after_ that whole ‘planning to shoot me’ bit stops sounding so plausible?”

Natasha snorts. “Didn’t you just say you two were getting on great?”

“I did, and we are. Which is why I don’t want anyone to get carried away. Dude’s still got a lot to work through.”

“Right.” He hears Natasha’s chair scrape as she rises. “Well, who knows - maybe he’s just wondering what kind of flowers you like best. Have you told him you like roses?”

It’s this comment, more than anything else, that keeps Bucky awake once Natasha and Sam have plodded off to join Steve in bed. It reverberates around one of the blank spots in his brain, and out of that blankness comes a faint, shaky idea of what it is he should do with feelings like the ones that are fluttering inside him now.

When morning rolls around, Sam and Steve and Natasha emerge from their bedroom at roughly the same time. All three of them look stiff and rumpled and very cheerful, and Sam falls into his seat at the table with his eyes scrunched shut and his arms suspended in a languid morning stretch.

Then jumps back up again very quickly.

“Jesus,” he yelps, and stares down wide-eyed at the small collection of sidearms his movement has just sent clattering to the floor. “How the hell did those…” He cuts himself off with a deep breath, and something like recognition creeps into his expression. Steve’s brow is furrowed. Behind him, Natasha’s lips are twitching into a slow smile.

“How about that wedding speech now?” she mutters under her breath.

A machine pistol and a couple of semi-automatics: they’re the last of the firearms Bucky has been keeping stashed in the bottom drawer of his bedside table. All he has left now are the pair of derringers under his pillow, and they’re not much use until he gets to point-blank range so he figures they don’t count.

He has to take several deep, steadying breaths as he watches Sam pick up the last of his treasured weapons cache. It’s not as if he can’t get more if he needs them, he reminds himself. And the gesture is important.

There are three freshly made cups of coffee waiting on the table. Next to Sam’s, a small uprooted shrub is shedding dirt and earwigs onto the tablecloth beneath it. It turns out that this is the wrong season and the wrong neighbourhood for the flowers he overheard Natasha mentioning, but this was the nicest plant Bucky could find at short notice. From his station in the corner of the living room he can see Sam’s jaw drop, can see disbelief and confusion and incredulity and -

There it is. A slowly unfurling smile. “Oh my god,” is all Sam says, from which Bucky infers that his operation has been a success.

 

 

The shrub ends up taking pride of place in a small terracotta pot on the kitchen counter. Sam waters it every day, and sometimes he comes and sits with Bucky on his night vigils and talks a cheerful stream of nonsense that dims the ache in Bucky’s chest to a dull throb.

Gradually, Bucky starts talking back. It feels strange to say so many words without a clear objective in mind, but Sam is always patient and he seems genuinely interested when Bucky tells him about his memories of summers hauling crates down at the docks or the art classes he and Steve used to take together.

“I didn’t know you could draw.” Sam sounds impressed - and Bucky _can’t_ any more, not the way he thinks Sam means, but he does draw him a detailed blueprint of his Hydra vault and a tactical map of their morning jogging route (possible ambush points marked in red). “That’s real nice, man,” says Sam, and tacks them up on the wall beside his shrub.

(“He’s just sharing what he knows,” he hears Sam say, when he finds Steve scrutinising the drawings the next morning with a hollow look in his eyes. “That’s all any of us can do.”)

Other nights Bucky prefers to stay quiet, and Sam doesn’t mind that either. He picks up his book and sits with Bucky in companionable silence, or else takes the opportunity to fill him in on things he’s missed across the past few decades. Politics is a fraught topic, since Bucky often has no memory of his role in world events and conflicts until Sam’s briefings stir up the memories. Culture is safer. Sam knows a lot about jazz, which Bucky knows he used to like; there are entire artistic movements that are new to him, new technologies that he’s never seen before, popular games and pastimes that he’s never had a chance to learn.

“You don’t talk to Steve much about this stuff, do you?” Sam observes one night, when they’re up on the roof and Bucky has lapsed into silence midway through a hazy recollection of following Steve through some Hydra facility in the south of France. “You’ve got all these memories of the stuff you and he used to do, but you never seem to want to tell him about any of it.”

Bucky shrugs. It’s a clear night, and the weather has been warming rapidly these past couple of weeks - the air is still cold, but it’s crisp now rather than biting. He likes nights like these: his mind is lucid and his memories sharp, but the lingering chill numbs him just a little to their cutting edges. “Steve already knows,” he says, and it’s true - it’s an inefficient use of his time, telling tales about the past to a man who remembers it better than he does.

It’s also a lie, because Steve doesn’t know how _much_ Bucky remembers. Doesn’t know that Bucky sometimes wakes to the taste of him in his mouth, more real and immediate than the air he’s breathing, doesn’t know that Bucky sits at home white-knuckled on the days Steve goes out alone on those missions he’s not allowed to know about because _the thing is pal you don’t have to_ and _promise me we’ll always stick together_ and _how can I protect you when you keep putting yourself in harm’s way_.

And Bucky’s not ready to tell him. There are too many pieces that still don’t fit together in his head, too many feelings his heart isn’t big enough to hold yet.

For the time being, he’s happy with the knowledge that some things about him are certain. Like the fact that he definitely does have a sex drive, after all - _definitely_ does. He doesn’t understand all the things he feels for Steve, but he does understand the way his body responds when his memories carry him back to that time in the tent after their mission in Greece or that week in a Czech forest where stolen moments were the only chance they ever had. And if he doesn’t have words for the squirming feeling in his stomach when his clumsy efforts at friendliness bring a smile to Sam’s face, then at least he knows why watching Sam’s rippling muscles on their morning jog makes the blood race in his veins. Sometimes his mind conjures up images of what Sam and Steve must look like, alone together in the main bedroom, and he scrunches his eyes shut and bites down on his pillow and thrusts into his hand until all he can see is white. Sometimes his own hand just isn’t enough, and the untouched need inside him is so strong that he feels like crawling out of his skin.

And it’s not just Sam and Steve who occupy this new category of unsatisfied wants. Natasha is staying with them almost every night now that her mission is over, and Bucky watches her laugh and smile and wrap her arms around the other two and feels a familiar prickle of want inside him, and wonders how many more of these feelings - _crushes_ , he’s heard Natasha call them - he can hope to contain inside his traitorous and unpredictable body.

 

 

In his darker moments, he knows that the feelings blooming inside him are ridiculous.

He’s come a long way since the day he followed Steve into the Potomac. There are days when he doesn’t think about bloodshed at all, days when he almost feels like a fully-fledged person. But everything has its limitations. You can defuse a bomb, he knows. You can even recycle some of its parts. You can make it harmless, but you can’t make it lovable. You can’t strip away the ugliness that was built into its very core.

In his darker moments, he watches the three of them, Steve and Sam and Natasha, snuggled together on the couch in perfect tessellation like they were made to be there. He watches them from the dark corner of the room where he feels safest, watches how perfectly they fill up the space around them until there’s not a gap left, and he _aches_.

 

 

The fact that he - or the Soldier, at least - has never been kept active for this long without a kill mission only occurs to Bucky on the day the long streak is broken.

He’s grown complacent. All these long months of living like a civilian in a completely unfortified suburban home, letting his guard down, taking the same jogging route every day around one of the city’s most conspicuous public landmarks, and he’d almost forgotten that the outside world was still teeming with people who wanted him and all his handlers dead.

He wakes to the sound of...nothing. Everything’s silent; even the meagre traffic out on the road has fallen quiet. He has nothing to go on but the raised hairs on the back of his neck, and the blaring alarm in that forgotten little part of his brain so conditioned to recognise danger that he no longer wields any conscious control over it.

His feet are silent when they hit the floor. They’re bare; his only armour is a pair of fleecy pyjama pants and a baggy t-shirt. He has a pistol in each hand, though he doesn’t remember retrieving them from under the pillow. When he strains his ears, he can hear movement in the corridor outside his room. Someone’s approaching. He drops into a low crouch behind the door and waits as it creaks open.

It’s not an intruder - it’s Natasha, and she’s less than happy to be greeted with an arm around her throat and a hand clapped over her mouth. The moment he recognises her he releases his grip, and she backs away from him grimacing and rubbing her throat.

“I was coming to tell you we’ve got company. Guess you already got that memo.”

Bucky nods. She’s in a similar state to him, dressed only in one of Steve’s giant t-shirts and a pair of borrowed men’s boxers, but better armed than he is with a loaded pair of Glocks.

“Steve and Sam are going around the back,” she whispers hoarsely. “We need to get you out before this gets ugly. Do you think you can make it back to -”

“No.”

Bucky’s surprised by the rasping sound of his own voice. Something very cold and very quiet is dripping into his brain. Natasha’s eyes are intense and anxious and he can hear five separate sets of footfalls out in the living room, so silent even he almost missed them. Between his two derringers he’s got six shots. There’s something rustling out in the garden: at least one additional hostile, maybe more. Someone has cut the streetlights.

“Barnes.” Her voice is wary - distant, muffled somehow. Adrenaline is scalding his veins, but he feels still and cold as a frozen lake. “Barnes, we don’t have time for this, you’re not combat-ready yet -”

Three sets of footfalls are drawing closer, heading down the hall. Natasha freezes mid-sentence and he knows she’s heard them too.

And Bucky has never - _never_ \- not been combat ready. They’re outnumbered by he doesn’t know how many and everything inside him is coiled to spring and something in the very core of his heart is trembling but he can’t leave them at a time like this. He can’t.

He needs to -

The footfalls are drawing closer.

“Window,” Natasha hisses.

“Guarded.” His window faces out onto the road - there’s bound to be a sentry there. And she understands. They move at the exact same time, sliding back behind the door like ghosts. In the near-perfect darkness the large mound of blankets on the bed looks like a body. They won’t know he’s already awake. As long as they check this room before discovering the empty main bedroom, it’s all the advantage he’ll need.

One of the intruders breaks off from the main group to nudge the door open. From there it’s child’s play: the man’s neck snaps under the strength of a metal arm before he can draw in breath to scream, and the Soldier swaps his derringers for the cold, familiar weight of the dead man’s M16.

“Take the two down the hall,” he hisses, and then he puts away the last little shreds of the trembling feeling in his chest and launches.

He knows this routine. Knows it in his bones, knows it like the most basic of survival instincts.

A commotion is breaking out in front of the house as he makes it to the living room. Gunfire. Shouting. The two men in the kitchen are rushing for the door so he takes them down, and the shattering glass and return fire on both sides catches him by surprise. The windows. They’ve got men stationed at every window - two each, he counts. He dives, rolls behind the counter, feels the glass shards digging into his palm. One of the bodies has fallen within reach of his cover. Sidearms - unnecessary. Stun gun - useless. Handcuffs. Knife. Knife. Spare magazine.

Grenade.

He tosses it over the kitchen counter, and the explosion clears the whole right side of the room. More return fire from the other side, panicked and haphazard. They’ve lost sight of him amid the airborne dust and debris. He dispatches them easily, and there’s no more gunfire, no sound of further movement. This time, he counted correctly.

He crouches back behind the counter. Listens carefully. Footsteps, approaching at a run from outside. Heavy breathing. He readies his rifle.

“Bucky!” It’s Steve, knocking the bullet-riddled front door off its hinges as he bursts into the room. Sam is close behind him. They’re panting but uninjured. “Bucky, are you here? Are you okay?”

His shouts ring louder than gunfire in the Soldier’s ears; he’ll do what he must to make it stop. “Seven targets down,” he reports, uncurling his finger from the trigger and rising to his feet. “No major damage sustained.” The trickle of blood from his palm is slowing. He’ll need to extract the glass shards embedded in the cuts, but that can wait.

The living room is in ruins. Natasha pushes through a pile of shattered plaster where the hallway entrance used to be - covered in dust, but also unharmed. “Rest of the house is clear,” she says, surveying the wreckage in one sweeping glance.

The sound of a chopper is audible in the distance. “We gotta get out of here,” says Sam. He’s got a hand wrapped around Steve’s arm, gripping tight. Natasha is already moving for the door. “Barnes. Come on.”

The exterior of the house has fared no better than the interior. Bullet holes. Shells. Cracked bricks and upturned earth. In the distance, there are sirens.

The Soldier drops his weapon at the scene, and follows where he is led.


	2. Chapter 2

There’s a room, concrete-walled and harshly lit, thick with the smell of antiseptic. A woman with rubber gloves and tweezers picking the glass shards from his half-healed palm. The frightened, anxious faces of his handlers looming over him. Another room. White walls, a cot bed, a small kitchenette and a couch in front of an enormous black screen which might be for entertainment or surveillance or both.

“Wait here,” he is told, and so he waits.

People come and go. Familiar faces whose words wash over him without imparting any trace of meaning. He is in a cage, and his mind is as cold and as still as ice.

Instinct takes over once, twice, three times. The sedatives don’t knock him out but they incapacitate him, leave him docile and pliant on the couch.

He sits. He waits.

“My name is Dr. Chen.” Her voice is steady and there’s a long syringe in her front pocket. “Are you listening to me, Mr. Barnes?”

He nods.

“Do you know where you are?” No. “Do you remember your name?” No. “What is your mission?” Wait here.

“He's dissociating,” she tells the man in the corner - Steve. “Short of keeping him sedated, our options-”

“Steve.” The word is thick and heavy on his tongue, but Steve whirls around immediately.

“Bucky?” Steve is coming closer, looming over the couch, too large and too fast and too close. “Bucky, are you with me? Are you -”

Metal hits flesh with a jarring thud. Nearby, someone is shouting.

He is in a cage, and his mind is as cold and as still as ice.

 

 

Function returns slowly. It feels like thawing: first his vision starts to clear, then he becomes aware of the strength in his limbs, then his mind is warm enough that words begin to make sense again.

“Who were they?” he asks through the barred door of his holding chamber. Steve’s head snaps up, and his eyes are startled and hopeful and sad all at once.

“Hydra,” Steve says. “A fringe group, we think - Natasha’s working to find out whose orders they were on. The important thing is that we’re in a safe place now.”

The Soldier nods. Their location is not relevant, so he doesn’t ask.

He is released from the holding cell once Dr. Chen has declared him no longer an immediate threat. The room they move him to is not much different: the door is solid instead of barred and there’s a bed and a kitchenette and a sofa, like the first room he was kept in when they arrived here. He confirms surveillance cameras in the large television and on the eastern wall, covering the whole living space except for the tiny adjoining bathroom. Altogether, the entire space takes up fifteen by twenty feet. He has not been instructed to stay, and he has no reason to leave, so he takes a seat on the sofa and lets the time pass.

The temperature of the room is very warm, he notices. The heating vents pump hot air through until he thinks he might be suffocating.

He isn’t left alone for long. Steve visits, and then Sam, and then Natasha, and Steve smiles as he watches him and Sam keeps up an idle stream of chatter and Natasha speaks to him in English and in Russian and keeps a knife hidden in her boot. All three of them have the tired, sunken eyes of targets who are losing the strength to keep running.

He is tired too. When he’s lost track of the hours and still he’s been given no orders, he sleeps. His dreams are cold, dripping with blood and the screams of victims he only half-remembers. He wakes with a metallic tang in his mouth and Natasha’s hands stroking his hair back from his forehead.

“I told you you weren’t combat-ready,” she is saying, in a voice that rides the edge between gentleness and anger. His breathing is slow and normal, but he can feel his heart hammering in his chest. “You could’ve gotten out. Why didn’t you?”

“You were outnumbered,” the Soldier says. It’s an easy answer. His mind is frozen and he can still taste blood where he’s bitten through his lip, but he has no orders and without them he can only default to what the tattered canvas of his memory is telling him. The world is full of nameless handlers and faceless targets, but there were three people back in that house who were not interchangeable. Three people who mattered. And they needed to get out.

“We’ve been outnumbered worse than that before, Barnes. We could’ve handled it.” Natasha sighs. “I appreciate the sentiment, but I also know two guys currently asleep downstairs who’ve spent a lot of time and energy trying to help you regain everything you’ve just lost.”

She’s still stroking his forehead. Slow, tender touches that are completely at odds with her stern tone of voice. “I haven’t lost,” the Soldier says, and the words disappear into his pillow but he feels Natasha tense beside him and knows that she has heard.

He has no name for the steely certainty that he feels as the words echo through his mind, no way to explain why they fall from his mouth as easy as breathing. Everything is cold, and he can hear the screams of half-remembered victims still echoing in his ears as blood oozes from his bitten lip. But underneath it all - underneath the stillness and the cold and the empty spaces inside his head - there’s a tempest raging somewhere deep inside him. He can’t reach it yet, can’t feel its bite, but it’s there.

It might, he thinks, have always been there.

 

 

“Natasha?”

He’s dreaming again - a long fall, a bone-deep cold, a familiar face looming over him as he struggles to move his frozen limbs. There’s a warm hand stroking his forehead and another carding through his hair and he can’t move, can’t breathe -

“It’s me, Bucky. It’s Steve.”

“Steve?” Crimson blood stains the snow around him and he’s warmer than he remembers ever feeling in his life and he can’t move, can’t breathe - doesn’t need to.

“I’m here.” Steve’s voice is strong, and its warm timbre drowns out the clamour in his mind. “I’m here, Bucky. I’m not gonna leave you. You’re safe here. We’re all safe. You can relax.”

The Winter Soldier does not believe it - not yet.

But he tries. He tries.

 

 

He’s been thinking about it as a dichotomy. Thinking about himself as two parts of a fractured whole, where sometimes he is James Buchanan Barnes (sergeant 107th 32557038 _with you til the end of the line_ ) and sometimes he is the Soldier (two targets confirmed death 10 hours mission compromised _wipe and start over_ ) and his mission is to be as much of the first and as little of the second as possible. But as he emerges into the light this time, the reality is something different.

Because he is still the Soldier. And he still remembers everything. And, underneath the thick cloak of numbness that descended the moment he snapped the first intruder’s neck, his heart is still swollen and pitted and scarred and _alive_ in all the same places. When he sees Steve and Sam and Natasha - tired and pale, with dark circles under their eyes but still here and _still together_ \- the ache is the same as it always has been.

And he starts to wonder if perhaps James Buchanan Barnes isn’t a separate person in the way he’s been visualising. Perhaps ‘James Buchanan Barnes’ is nothing more than the name that’s been absent from the Soldier’s files all these years - a name that’s been lying in stasis, waiting for him to reclaim it.

They are in the Avengers Tower, where Tony Stark and his extensive security system have been shielding them from further Hydra attacks. There are nights, of course, when even the impartial reassurances of the tower’s AI are not enough to convince him the perimeter is secure: he patrols it himself, with sharp eyes and keen ears and no weapon except for the strength of his own two fists. With an assassin’s instinct he scopes out every possible point of vulnerability in the tower’s defenses, with special attention to the floor where Steve and Sam and Natasha share their quarters. On nights when he can’t sleep, he stands guard over them.

(He hears each breath they take, hears each creak of the bed when they take comfort in each other’s arms. It’s normal, and it doesn’t concern him. He wasn’t made for feelings like this. He recognises the longing for what it is: a malfunction, an aberration.)

It’s still hard to be around the others in waking hours sometimes. He notices the wariness in their eyes whenever they approach him, notices how carefully Steve chooses his words and how Sam has stopped thumping his back when they pass and how Natasha makes so much more noise than necessary when entering rooms he’s in. They’re frightened of him, he thinks. Frightened of triggering an outburst, frightened that he will forget himself and resume doing what he was built to do.

Because they know, like he knows, that you can defuse a bomb. You can make it harmless, but you can never make it lovable, can never strip away the ugliness that’s built into its very core.

You can defuse a bomb, but in times of war it’s more useful if you can redirect its explosion.

He rehearses his words carefully. Practices in the mirror until his smile is as charming as his picture in the Smithsonian, until his eyes are sad and hopeful and resolute in the way he thinks they are supposed to be. “I want to start training again,” he announces when he is ready, when all four of them are together in the spacious living room of the apartment Stark has assigned them. “I’m tired of sitting still waiting for Hydra to find me.”

(And it feels strange, because training is something he’s used to doing when he is ordered - but the orders aren’t arriving these days, no one who handles him now is willing to give them, which means that he must take matters into his own hands if he is to keep functioning as designed.)

The initial response doesn’t surprise him: all three of them exchange glances, worry written plainly on their faces, and Steve looks like he’s fighting a vicious internal battle as he opens his mouth. “Hydra’s not going to get to you here, Buck. You’re safe.”

“I know.” The rehearsal is paying off - his voice sounds steady, animated, and very nearly as earnest as Steve’s. “But I’m tired of pretending I don’t know how to fight. This is my skill set - I just want to use it on my own terms.”

He ignores the way Sam gnaws on his lip, the way Natasha’s brows contract as she looks at him. He focuses on Steve - focuses on the confusion and reluctance and guilt all written in his eyes. “Of course, Bucky. I get that. It’s just…” Steve pauses, sucks in a deep breath. “Is now really the best time to get back into it, do you think? After everything that’s happened?”

If he thinks of it as a mission then the words come easily. If he thinks of it as a mission, he can relax his mind and let half-forgotten muscle memory drag the Brooklyn forward to the tip of his tongue. “Now’s the only time, Steve. I have to know I can do this. You of all people should understand that.”

Steve’s resistance collapses more readily than he hoped it would. “I’ll talk to Stark,” Steve says heavily. “He’s got a training facility downstairs. We’ll, uh...we’ll have to clear this with Dr. Chen first.”

Which is fine. Dr. Chen has talked to him about this already - about autonomy, about self-directed progress and his active role in the thing she calls his ‘healing journey’. And the Soldier - Bucky - is a fast learner. That, beyond all his physical enhancements and his mental conditioning, is what has always made him so valuable as an asset.

He doesn’t miss the sharp look Natasha casts him as he leaves. He’s not surprised when she comes to find him, hours later, perched up on the roof of the tower looking out over the sprawling network of roads and traffic far below. Her feet slap on the concrete with just that bit more noise than necessary, but she doesn’t speak until she’s right beside him, dangling her legs over the tower’s edge and staring aimlessly out at the horizon.

“You know,” she says, “it’s not very nice to manipulate people.”

He should probably have a rebuttal to this, he knows. But after his performance earlier today his thoughts have slowed to a tired, sluggish trickle. Acting like a person is more exhausting than any fight he’s ever been in, so he says nothing and keeps on scanning the traffic below, alert for any irregularities. So far there are none.

“For what it’s worth,” says Natasha, “I think it’s good for you to get back into it. Like you said, this is your skill set. If you’re ready to explore it under controlled conditions then that’s better than waiting til the next time someone forces your hand.” The rhythmic tapping of her fingers on the concrete is invasive, dragging his mind back to the rooftop from where it’s been stalking amid the traffic below. “And hey - that was some impressive theatre back there. Targeting Steve was a nice touch. But manipulation isn’t your M.O., Barnes. I want to know what kind of game you’re playing here.”

She sounds suspicious. And it’s no particular surprise to the Soldier that she doesn’t trust him, but it _does_ surprise him that the realisation makes his heart twang painfully.

It’s not as if disagrees with her caution.

“Steve would have refused,” he says dully. “He doesn’t want…” _me._ “My abilities. He wants me to stay decommissioned.”

Natasha arches a brow. “He wants you to stay _safe_ ,” she corrects. “We all do.” Bucky knows she’s talking about more than just his safety in combat, but the thought is difficult to wrap his tired head around. “No offense, but you turned kinda scary the last time you got your hands on a gun. And don’t bother trying the innocent eyes and old-timey accent on me - I recognise autopilot when I see it. You haven’t been yourself ever since that night.”

When he greets her words with silence, she doesn’t break it. Just watches him and keeps tapping her fingers on the ground until the sound of it echoes through every compartment in his mind. He thought autopilot was a _good_ thing - a sign of mastery, a skill so well perfected that its use no longer requires conscious effort.

He furrows his brows with the effort of concentration. “When am I myself, then?” It’s a genuine question, but it’s also frustration. He is trying. He is trying, but their expectations are a shifting target and for the first time in working memory he can’t get a clear lock.

Natasha is quiet for a very long time. If she knows the answer, she isn’t prepared to give it to him - he’s doesn’t know why he would have expected otherwise. “Don’t make us your mission,” is all she says, and her smile is sad and frayed around the edges. “You don’t have to get past us to reach the things you want. You’ll be a lot less miserable the sooner you figure that out - take it from me.”

He stays on the roof for a long time after she leaves. The phantom tap of her fingers is still ringing in his mind, and the traffic below is as steady and non-threatening as ever.

 

 

On his first day of training he ends up with an audience.

There’s Dr. Chen, there to supervise and step in if he starts showing danger signs. There’s Tony Stark, the man who can only be Howard Stark’s son, who modified a training simulation for him on condition that he’s allowed to collect data on the Soldier’s performance. There’s Steve, reluctance and anxiety etched deep into his face, and Sam with a comforting hand on Steve’s shoulder and a frown that’s half worry and half curiosity. There’s Natasha wearing a smile to hide her razor-edged focus, and a man Bucky doesn’t know with short hair and a military swagger and an arm that curls comfortably around Natasha’s waist.

It’s a bit like the demonstrations Hydra used to have him put on for potential clients, and a bit like the way the other recruits back at training camp used to gather around as he lined up a difficult shot.

The exercise is straightforward. An obstacle course of sorts, where his weapons are two laser pistols and his targets are emphatically non-humanoid shapes that duck in and out of his range at high speed but never move to defend or retaliate. There’s no satisfaction in knocking them down, and he finishes the course in what Stark declares to be record time but the Soldier feels is an aggravating waste.

“We’re easing you into it,” says Dr. Chen, checking him over when he finishes the simulation with perfectly even breathing and a tense, frustrated expression. “Triggers can catch you by surprise - it’s best if you’re not exposed to any violent scenarios or loud noises for a while yet.”

“Not bad,” says the man Bucky doesn’t know, and sticks out a hand that Bucky stares at blankly for a brief moment before remembering he’s expected to shake it. “Clint Barton,” the man says. “Hope you don’t mind Natasha bringing me ‘round to watch. Not many people can say they’ve seen the Winter Soldier in action.”

Steve looks like he’s ready to say something sharp, but Bucky finds he appreciates the man’s straightforwardness. This is the first time he can remember that any of his new handlers have referred to his history without tensing up like the mere topic is a threat. “This isn’t action,” is all Bucky says, with a stiff little shake of his head. He’s not sure where the cocky lilt in his voice is coming from, but it’s making a slow smile spread across Barton’s face.

“Easy there, Rambo,” Stark cuts in from his place by the control panel where he’s flicking through the results he’s just collected. “We’ll work you up to it, okay? When the doc here gives the go-ahead, I’ll hook you up with my best strike sim. Screaming civilians, massive collateral damage - you’ll love it.”

“Tony.” Steve’s voice is a low growl.

“Perhaps we might try some intermediate steps first,” says Dr. Chen with a bland smile. “You did well today, James. Let’s not push things too far all at once.”

Privately, Bucky thinks screaming civilians would be easier to cope with than this slow, drawn-out, meaningless process. But then - maybe that’s the point. He knows that he’s supposed to be learning something from Dr. Chen, from Steve and Sam and Natasha, from the unrelenting gentleness of the care he’s receiving. And learning has always been painful.

This is a different kind of pain to what he’s used to. Frustration, unspent tension, a suffocating sense of waste - very different from the electric currents and vein-searing drugs of Hydra’s labs. Still, making the connection helps. Learning is supposed to be painful. Right now, it follows, he must be learning.

_Has_ to be learning, because there’s a Hydra splinter group still out there waiting for a second show of weakness.

He hands the laser guns back to Stark, and leaves the arena without a word of complaint.

 

 

He progresses from fighting shapeless, defenseless blobs to fighting shapeless blobs with minor defensive capabilities courtesy of Stark’s program updates. He gains access to the gym, which has been reinforced to withstand anything short of a nuclear missile strike, and runs himself through exercises and training drills that he finds his body can complete with no input from his memory. He works until he’s panting for breath and the sweat runs in rivulets down his forehead. He meets with Dr. Chen and tells her his training is going well; he feels good, he feels normal; no, there have been no panic attacks or dissociative episodes. On Dr. Chen’s go-ahead, Stark upgrades his training simulation further: humanoid targets, meaningful vital stats, proper defensive and offensive capabilities.

His access to the simulation isn’t unconditional. Dr. Chen requires him to spend more time in communal areas of the tower in exchange for his training hours, and so in his time off he stakes out a corner of the common room and tries not to attract anyone’s attention. Despite his best efforts he ends up being introduced to Pepper Potts, who seems non-dangerous, and Bruce Banner, who also seems non-dangerous but (if Stark’s steady stream of teasing observations is to be believed) is the only person in the tower who Bucky couldn’t be sure of taking out in an emergency.

(He needs to know. There is no threat and there will _be_ no emergency, but - still, he needs to know.)

The only real alternative to the common room is the apartment, three floors further up, that he shares with Steve and Sam. Bucky doesn’t go there much, not during the day. Too often Steve and Sam are _there_ , and they smile at him and make friendly conversation and he knows it’s no different from how things were back at Sam’s house. It’s his own insides that are different. He’s got mission scenarios in the back of his mind for every potential target in the tower - he tries not to notice but they steal into his brain of their own accord, so that he knows without trying that Banner leaves every day at 0600 hours and comes back at 0700, that there’s a panic button within arm’s reach of every bed on every residential floor, that if he blows out the tower’s main power grid he’ll have a two minute window while auxiliary systems boot.

And when Steve smiles that affectionate smile at him, when Sam’s gentle, unbloodied hands clasp his shoulder as they pass, the pleasant warmth he used to feel is subsumed by a different kind of heat again: hot and bubbling and acrid, like the feeling of failure on a mission or the feeling of an angry handler standing over him afterwards.

Natasha, for some reason, is the only one of them who it doesn’t hurt to be around. Perhaps it’s because she has already seen through so many of his efforts at normalcy. She splits her time fairly evenly between Steve and Sam and Barton, these days, and sometimes she brings Barton down to the common room with her and the three of them play what she calls a _really fun game, come on Barnes, it’s good for you_. Mostly it involves planning out hypothetical mission scenarios based on briefing packets she gets from god knows where, with implausible objectives like _extract this man from a high-security prison complex armed with nothing but a lockpick and a stun gun_ or _shut down a nuclear missile launch with no weapons at all and a strict zero-casualty rule_. He hasn’t yet figured out why he has to play the game, but he _has_ hypothetically dismantled a vast government conspiracy using a barbecue skewer as his main weapon, fended off two invasions by unspecified alien races, and won himself Barton’s grudging admiration and a proud smile from Natasha.

Even now he can’t make sense of their reactions. They both know exactly who they’re talking to, because in their company he doesn’t bother acting harmless. But they don’t seem to expect him to. Sometimes the hypothetical missions are clean and other times they’re brutal, and Natasha and Barton’s expressions never change. They pepper every planning session with input like _you could try a garotte, they’ve always worked for me_ and _even alien berserkers are gonna falter if you gouge their eyes out_ and _hey, Tasha, you remember that time in Gdansk with the broadsword?_ They don’t even seem to mind when scraps of his old memories resurface without warning mid-game. “I’ve been to Gdansk,” he says, more to help prompt his own memory than out of any real desire to communicate. “There was a charity gala there. I blew up the host.” Natasha just nods attentively, and Barton replies with, “Our guy was in the middle of a big diplomatic welcome dinner,” as though comparing notes on a casual day outing.

It occurs to him more than once that a lot of Natasha and Barton’s stories have familiar themes. He’s run missions like theirs. Under different orders, of course, but the general principles don’t vary that much. And for the first time since he talked his way into Tony Stark’s flimsy training environment, Bucky feels _vindicated_.

So he still can’t face Steve and Sam - maybe he’s not supposed to be able to. But he knows what he _can_ do. Knows what he was made for. Knows, without a doubt now, that there’s a place on Captain America’s team for someone with skills like his.

He can make this work.

 

 

Natasha traces the Hydra splinter group to an old industrial facility in Newark, of all places. Bucky knows because she tells him directly. “For the record,” she says, “I’m still not sure if you’re combat ready. You’re going to have to decide that for yourself. If you think you can keep a lid on the mindless drone routine this time, we’re heading out tonight.”

He’s willing to assume that Steve and Sam won’t be as comfortable with his decision as she is. He’s also willing to assume they haven’t been consulted, which is possibly for the best. Natasha lets him into the armoury to choose what he wants, and for once he doesn’t have to struggle with the concept. He finds everything he needs for what he remembers as his standard arsenal, along with a heavily modified M4 carbine with a fitted grenade launcher that he promptly decides is essential equipment, even though Natasha assures him quite drily that he won’t be needing a launcher in the close quarters they’re going to.

(“You can’t know that,” he insists, clipping a couple of rounds to his belt with a defiant frown. They have no way of knowing how much resistance they’re going to meet. The extra weight won’t slow him down. The Winter Soldier does not go in under-prepared.)

“You sure you’re ready for this, Buck?” is the only thing Steve says when he sees Bucky come out in full combat gear with his gun slung at his side for the trip. He expected some kind of resistance, but all he sees in Steve’s eyes is worry and sadness and -

Bucky looks away. “I’m ready,” he says. This is just a mission, and he’s always been ready. Never really been anything _but_ ready. He wonders if the sadness in Steve’s eyes is because he’s finally starting to realise that.

They head out, just the four of them. Sam drives; Steve takes the passenger seat and runs them through the plan. Natasha has scoped out the facility as best as she can, but their intel on what to expect inside is sketchy. “If someone looks important, try to take them alive,” Steve instructs. “We’ll need to interrogate them, make sure there aren’t more of their group still on the loose. I don’t want to have to do this twice.”

“Hydra operatives are trained to avoid capture by any means necessary,” says Bucky flatly. “If we try to contain them -”

“Cyanide pill. I know.” For reasons best known to himself, Steve chooses this moment to cast Bucky another one of his very sad looks. “From what I’ve seen, the guys higher up the ladder are a bit more lax about that rule for themselves. There’s no point trying with the field agents. If you find someone in a suit, that’s who you bring in.”

“Got it.” Bucky doesn’t understand why Steve has adopted his gentlest tone giving this explanation, but he’s got his objective and that’s all he needs.

He can feel the cold creeping into his mind as they approach the factory. It doesn’t take him over this time. It’s an interesting counterpoint to the adrenaline that’s starting to flood his veins, and it feels a bit like he’s standing on a very thin bank between two violent currents. If he slips one way, or the other -

He doesn’t slip. He won’t.

The factory looks deserted. Chained gates, locked front doors, blacked-out windows. The plan is simple: Steve and Sam tank in through the main door, Natasha disables security, Bucky detours via the fusebox and slips in around the back. They have to assume that the planning department’s blueprints of the building are well out of date and that, knowing Hydra, the real challenge will be locating the secret door or underground bunker or whatever it is the factory’s covering for.

They’re not expecting to stay undetected for long, but Hydra moves quicker than expected. Bucky hears movement inside the instant he cuts the power - no exclamations, not a word of speech, just the quiet, stealthy rustle of a tac team gearing up. They must’ve been on watch for an attack. And there’s very little chance they’ll mistake this for an authentic power outage, once they get outside - Bucky is not, after all, an electrical engineer. Indiscriminate cable-tearing has always served him well enough.

Still. He can’t attack yet, not until Steve and Sam and Natasha are all in position. It’s a small building, closed in between two other factories and practically built to echo - once the first shout goes up, the stealth phase of the mission is over. It’s a five-man team that comes out to check the fusebox and all of them have their rifles cocked. He makes it up onto the roof before the back door swings open, watches them fan out in careful formation across the parking lot.

“Front door’s clear,” comes Steve’s voice in Bucky’s earpiece. “Ready to move in. Status?”

“I’m in,” Natasha crackles back. “They’re flanking the exits. Five headed your way, Barnes.”

“I’ve got them,” Bucky hisses into his receiver. They’re checking the _cars_ , one by one, and no one’s even thought to glance back at the roof yet.

“Alright,” says Steve, his voice dropping to barely a whisper - he’s already on the move. “Let’s do this. On my mark.”

The signal (for lack of a better word) is a loud, ringing crash that confirms Bucky’s echo-trap assessment. Steve must have kicked down the door. In the din that follows Bucky fires five shots and watches five bodies crumple, then jumps back down from the roof and shoulders the door open. Most of the guards are scrambling for the front door and the source of all the noise, so he catches their attention with a quick burst of fire and from there - well, it’s all muscle memory from there.

And it’s only once Natasha drops from the rafters and lands lightly by his side that he realises how fast his heart is pounding. It’s been so long since he fought like this, and longer still since he actively chose to. This isn’t just a mission. These are his personal enemies - they threatened his handlers, his _friends_ \- and now they’re falling like toy soldiers. They keep coming and coming and the whole building is going up in chaos and he’s…

He’s _exhilarated_.

“How are you feeling?” Natasha yells to him, over the loud clashing of bullets against the toppled frame of what he thinks is some kind of industrial refrigerator but for now is mainly just functioning as cover.

“Good,” he shouts back, and for once the word rolls easily from his tongue. The cold’s still there but it’s not taking him over, and in a momentary lull of hostile fire he ducks back up and picks off two who’ve left their shelter. “Not much to do back here, though. Want to push forward?” The banter feels like the most natural thing in the world, somehow, and Natasha’s answering smile is _vibrant_.

It’s really not a fair fight. These hostiles are, after all, part of the same splinter group that thought a dozen low-level operatives could take out a close-knit team of heroes _and_ the Winter Soldier all in one ambush. They’re tenacious, but also desperately under-funded and understaffed and nothing like the well-trained units Bucky used to work with. He still feels perfectly in control when they rendezvous with Steve and Sam once the ground floor is clear, and - yeah, there’s a stairwell hidden behind a stocking shelf on the eastern wall. Even Hydra has only so many tricks up its sleeve.

The lights are on at the bottom of the stairwell. Backup power has come on, or else downstairs is running on a separate grid. The place is built like an enormous bomb shelter, all steel and concrete, and there’s no one in sight. No sign of movement, no noise except for the quiet buzz of the lights overhead. The air is fresh and cool and smells faintly of antiseptic. Bucky’s still riding the thrill of the fight, but his feet falter as they hit the threshold. Even through all the adrenaline he can sense it - deeper than memory, deeper even than instinct.

There’s pain inside this dull concrete bunker. Pain that cuts through his excitement like soft butter, and suddenly exhilaration is giving way to something much, much colder.

“Maybe they evacuated,” Sam breathes, and Bucky - doesn’t. There’s something welling up from one of the blank spots in his mind, like radio static only quieter, less defined. It’s...it’s happening fast. The air is getting thinner. He closes his eyes.

“No. We’re on the only exit.”

Something’s coming into focus. He’s been here before, he realises, and beside him he can _feel_ rather than see everyone tensing up, holding their breath, watching him.

A bed, cold and white and sterile. Restraints. A quiet static buzz. Blurred faces and a needle stabbing into his neck and pain and then less pain and then _more_ pain, and blood in his mouth and a rubber bit sliding between his teeth and -

“This is a repair facility,” he says, tasting each word like tangy copper on his tongue. He’s been going well, he’s been enjoying this fight. The cold is there in his mind but it isn’t taking him over. He’s on the narrow bank between two violent currents and if he slips either way - if he slips, if he - “Hall to the right.” When did speech become so _alien_ in his mouth? “Main lab.”

He was here, once. He doesn’t remember arriving but he remembers the layout. He remembers the buzzing lights and another sound, harsh and grating, metal on metal. A problem with his arm - neural interface malfunction. A hand cupping his face, tilting his chin up. A gun’s cold muzzle digging in under his jaw -

“You _promised_ , Barnes.”

He’s moving. His feet press silently on the concrete floor and Natasha’s voice is stern in his ear. “What?” His voice is cracked, hoarse. Like he’s been screaming for hours, but not a sound has left his lips.

“The mindless drone thing,” says Natasha sharply. “You promised you wouldn’t.”

“I’m not,” he grits out, at the same time that Steve says, “Natasha!” in an angry hiss.

“No offense, but you kind of look like you are,” says Natasha, ignoring Steve. Her hand is heavy and far too hot on Bucky’s arm. He resists the urge to throw her off. “Hold it together, Barnes. Tell us what we need to know about this place.”

It’s an order. Steve has caught up with them, his jaw set and his eyes like hot coals. Sam’s still back at the doorway, like he hasn’t decided whether to stand guard or follow. The static in the Soldier’s head is getting louder and he’s been given an _order_. “They’ve locked the place down,” he reports. They’ll have gone into lockdown the moment they detected the intrusion upstairs. “This is a backup facility. Not equipped for withstanding direct assault.” The men upstairs will have been all but a couple of the full response team. The rest will be guarding the lab personnel as they bunker down, waiting for backup from headquarters that no longer exist. “All clear to move in.”

Sam is stepping closer now, keeping his movements slow and measured and easy to follow. “We’re not moving in anywhere just yet,” he says. “C’mon, Barnes, take it easy. You can do this. You’ve been doing great.”

Of course he can do this. The response team’s down, the survivors are locked in the lab like fish in a barrel. It’s a straightforward mission, his orders clearly say -

nothing, they say _nothing_ , he has no orders he’s here with his handlers his _friends_ he’s keeping it together he’s been here before he -

Bed, cold and white and sterile. A routine procedure, they say, not speaking to him. He can’t talk around the bit in his mouth. He didn’t want to come here - he resisted - a dozen men led him through the door, rifles jammed up against the base of his skull. Hall to the right. Main lab, blinding lights, the stench of antiseptic.

“ _Bucky_. Bucky, just stop, just _listen_ to us.” Steve’s voice is strained; the Soldier pushes past him, knocks Natasha’s hand from his arm. He knows his own way. Can still hear his own screams echoing down the hallway - routine procedures were always the worst. Routine procedures meant _just keep him conscious, don’t worry about it_.

This time he’s not restrained - he takes the rest of the hall at a run, dimly hears the shrieking of hinges as his fist connects with the door to the main lab.

Two armed guards. Only two - the rest are upstairs, gone. Two armed guards and they’re gone too, a bullet through the temple, a bullet through the throat and they both drop. Six left in the room, white coats, no threat; three behind him out in the corridor, armed and running and _friendly do not fire_ -

\- _do not fire they’re your_ -

“Stand down, soldier.”

Six left in the room, one is stepping forward. The stench of fear rolls off him in waves. He’s familiar - a hand cupping his face, a muzzle pressed into the hollow of his jaw. A routine procedure, just keep him conscious, we haven’t got time for this. “Stand down _now_.” The Soldier doesn’t move. It’s the clearest order he’s been given in months and he - he can’t remember how. Hold it together. Hold it together, don’t lash out, stand down do not fire they’re your

muzzle pressed under his jaw in the man’s shaking hand and he remembers. Stand down. You’re damaged. We’re here to fix you.

“Don’t move,” snarls the man. He’s not talking to the Soldier. Three more in the doorway, fear and alarm and anger in their eyes, and the man digs the muzzle harder into the Soldier’s jaw and everyone goes still.

“Bucky!” Steve’s voice is urgent, tugging at something in the Soldier’s mind and he remembers this too, there’s a reason he came here and it wasn’t for repair. He’s not damaged, he’s not - “Bucky, keep it together. Try to think, okay? This isn’ t-”

“ _Bucky_?” the man with the gun says incredulously. His lips are curling into a sneer and he still reeks of terror and adrenaline but there’s something else there as well, something the Soldier recognises deep in his bones. “Is that what you’re calling it now?”

Something jolts inside the Soldier’s memory. Heat is shimmering behind his eyes and his hands - his hands are starting to shake. He doesn’t know why. He’s holding it together, he’s.

“That,” says Steve in a low snarl, “is his _name_. And you need to drop that gun. There are six of you, and you’re barely armed. This doesn’t have to get ugly.”

The sneer is widening across the man’s chalk-white face. Last time the Soldier saw him, he wasn’t sneering _or_ shaking - just calm. It’s a routine procedure. We need you conscious. Calm down, it’s nearly over, _can someone shut him up_. “You’ve been tampering with Hydra property, Captain Rogers. We just want what’s ours. We’re not interested in a fight.”

The heat shimmer is rising, blotting out the Soldier’s vision. They’re - they’re talking about him. Hydra property. A weapon, a thing. And they’re _wrong_. This isn’t - this isn’t how it _is_ any more, he’s not, he’s not a thing, he -

Steve is talking again, but the words are drowned out by the blood thrumming in the Soldier’s ears. He’s not damaged, he’s not here for repair. He’s here for a _reason_ , he. He _remembers -_

And then he forgets, altogether, and there’s nothing any more except the rushing heat-haze that takes him over and the static buzz inside his mind and the blood on his hands and -

and he moves like they taught him to, and they’re no match. The screams fade to nothing in his ears and the black blood of six men spatters the concrete floor all he knows is blinding, swirling _rage_.

 

 

He’s on his knees. Panting, shaking. The heat-haze is fading and everything - sight, smell, taste - is blood.

The bodies are hideous. Six kills: no need to look closer for confirmation.

A warm, strong hand rests on his trembling shoulder. “Bucky,” says a familiar voice, low in his ear. “Come on Bucky, we need to get you out of here - it’s okay, you’re safe, it’s all over now. We just need to -”

“I’m fine, Steve.” He doesn’t know where the words are coming from. Doesn’t know why they’re so steady, when everything else inside him is shaking. “I’m fine. It’s still me. I still remember.”

He owns this. The blood on his hands, the carnage around him - this, in the end, is what he was made for.

 

 

The fear creeps in afterwards, long after any danger has passed.

It’s  a strange thing. Bucky thought he knew all he needed to know about fear: an involuntary set of chemical reactions produced by the brain in response to threats of pain, damage or death. It takes him some time to decide that the new emotion churning inside him is also a kind of fear, because it’s not arising from any of the usual sources. Inside the barred walls of the small holding cell, there’s no risk of injury or attack. He’s as safe here as he’s likely to be anywhere.

(He had to ask Dr. Chen to lock the door behind him when he let himself in. She said he didn’t need to be here; he couldn’t find the words to explain that it was familiar and comforting, this place, the closest thing to proper post-mission containment he can access inside the tower.)

A full forty-eight hours pass while he lies flat on his back on the tiny cot bed, or huddles at its foot with his chin on his knees, or stands at half-hearted attention by the door on the off-chance a threat appears out of nowhere. It’s enough time for him to decide that what he’s feeling is definitely fear - fear because he’s shown his hand in full, now, and no manufactured smile or vintage Brooklyn accent is going to make Steve and Sam and Natasha forget that that they just saw him paint an entire lab red with the blood of six screaming men.

“Do you regret killing them?” Dr. Chen asks, in her most neutral and unassuming tone - the one she uses when he’s been silent for too long and she expects him to start talking. Regret is an unfamiliar concept to Bucky, and not one that makes much sense when he tries to apply it to those men in the lab. They’re irrelevant. He doesn’t _regret_ that they’re dead, and it makes no difference that it was him who killed them instead of someone else. From the intel they found inside the lab it looks like the group was working alone, so he doesn’t even have to regret not saving any prisoners.

Where the fear comes from is closer to home. Because he’s spent months convincing everyone - convincing _himself_ \- that he was becoming something different than what Hydra made him. Learning to smile and laugh and _want_ , to feel things that weapons are not supposed to feel. After what they’ve seen of him now, he wonders if he might be better off just keeping himself here in storage until he’s needed for another mission.

At exactly the forty-nine hour mark, Dr. Chen evicts him from the holding cell. “You know I don’t give orders,” she tells him, very calm and very firm. “I think it was sensible of you to take some decompression time in here. But if you want to keep hiding from your friends, you’ll need to find somewhere else to do it. I’m not facilitating this any more.”

Bucky swallows. “I’m dangerous,” he tries, tongue rasping like sandpaper in his dry mouth. “I could hurt someone if you let me out.” Even he can tell how feeble it sounds.

“I trust you,” says Dr. Chen in a tone of absolute finality, and Bucky knows better than to keep on fighting a losing fight.

He could slip up to the roof unnoticed. He could go to the common room and try not to catch anyone’s attention. He could find a dark, private corner on one of the many floors and stay there, but he ends up going back to the apartment. There is only so far he can run and he knows it, so he turns around and walks toward his fear with bleak resignation.

All three of them are there when he steps out of the elevator. Piled onto the couch together, Steve on one end with his arm draped around Sam’s shoulders, Natasha at the end with her legs stretched out across both of their laps. They look perfectly casual, perfectly at ease, but he realises the moment they all catch sight of him and hitch bright, identical smiles onto their faces that he has walked right into an ambush.

Just not the kind of ambush he was expecting.

“Bucky!” Steve greets him, and he sounds so _normal_ \- like the last time they saw each other was across the breakfast table or out in the common room, not deep underground in a secret Hydra lab splattered with fresh blood and surrounded by mutilated corpses. “What a coincidence - we were just about to start our movie. Want to join us?”

They’ve pulled an extra armchair around in front of the TV, right next to the couch on Steve’s end. Back to the wall, clear line of sight to the exit, out of view from the windows. A small nest of blankets piled up on it and waiting. Something is prickling in Bucky’s eyes. His throat feels tight, and after two days of near-total silence he doesn’t trust himself to speak.

“We got popcorn,” says Sam, and thrusts the bowl forward as if to lure Bucky closer. “You like popcorn, right?”

“Everyone likes popcorn,” says Natasha confidently. “Come on, Barnes, you’ll love this one. It’s so cute.”

The movie is a cartoon about dancing penguins. He sits with his knees tucked up close to his body, watches the screen with vacant disinterest, and tries not to feel too disoriented by the striking absence of fear or disgust in anyone else’s eyes.

Thirty minutes in, his body starts to shake uncontrollably.

Thirty-one minutes in, Steve is reaching over the arm of the couch to tuck Bucky’s blankets in tighter around him. “Hey, hey, it’s alright. You’re alright here. You’re okay.”

And somehow - against all reason, against all worldly probability - everything is normal.

 

 

“Before you get better,” says Bucky, “you have to hurt.” It’s a question, worded wrong because he doesn’t know how to ask. He’s curled on his side and it’s Steve’s weight beside him on the bed, this time - though these days it’s a fast-rotating roster - and in the darkness of the bedroom he can say things he can’t say under daylight.

For a moment, the silence is so profound that he wonders if Steve has fallen asleep. In his dream this time there was a table, and solid restraints to pin his arms, and a searing pain in the front of his skull. In his dream, Steve’s hand on his forehead was a cruel metal vice.

But there’s no trace of sleep in Steve’s voice when he finally replies. “That...depends on what you mean by hurt,” he says cautiously.

Hurt like an electric current pulsing through his brain. Hurt like a scalpel cutting through layers of flesh. “In the lab,” Bucky says, frowning into his pillow with the effort of putting the right words together. “I was damaged, so they were fixing me. It wasn’t…” Wasn’t _like_ in his other memories, the ones where he’s holding a gun to a crying man’s head or following a trail of blood through acres of snow-clad forest. The things he’s dreaming now, they’re not about destruction and brutality and the familiar pictures that normally make him scream himself awake. “It was a routine procedure. It was necessary.”

The mattress shifts beneath them as Steve sits up. His hand in Bucky’s hair is very still, fingers stiff and rigid against his scalp. “Bucky, nothing Hydra did to you was necessary. The way they treated you -” He breaks off; his voice sounds thick and unsteady. “The way they treated you was unforgivable. Every moment of it.”

The darkness hides the pained look on Steve’s face, but Bucky can hear it in the way he’s speaking. And he still doesn’t understand. “But I needed repairing,” he says, praying for Steve to see his point - wishing he knew what his point _was_. “I’m not useful if I’m not maintained.” The words drip from his tongue like tar, dark and viscous. “I want to be useful. To you. Sam. Natasha.”

For a long moment, there is nothing but the cracked sound of Steve’s breathing. “There’s a difference,” Steve says at long last, “between being useful and being used.”

His hand is moving again. Long, slow strokes through Bucky’s hair, and Bucky’s voice has dropped to a shaky whisper when he opens his mouth. “I don’t remember the difference.”

“I know, Buck.” Steve doesn’t falter this time. His touch is sending goosebumps all down Bucky’s spine, sweeping away the crawling, dirty feeling the latest dream left on his skin. “It’s okay not to have everything figured out. I just want you to know -” Steve sucks in a deep breath. “I just want you to understand that it _matters_ , when you’re hurting. What they did to you back at that lab...it wasn’t necessary, it wasn’t useful. It was _wrong_. And it’s never going to happen again.”

By all meaningful standards it should be an empty promise - ineffectual, meant only to soothe. Coming from Steve, it means...something. Bucky isn’t sure what. He only knows that the tension in his chest is easing under Steve’s touch, and without meaning to he tilts his head back into Steve’s hand and lets his eyes fall closed.

“You’re so much more than just useful,” Steve goes on - distant now, like he’s not sure whether he’s talking to Bucky or just to himself. “You’re our friend. You’re part of our team.”

Bucky thinks he could fall back to sleep just like this, with Steve’s voice in his ear and a gentle hand combing through his hair. But there’s something still hanging in the air, something else Steve isn’t saying, and Bucky’s relaxed and comfortable enough that for once the words aren’t so difficult to find. “Before, during the war...I was part of your team then, too. Me and that other woman.”

Steve’s breath hitches. For a moment it seems like Bucky’s said something wrong, but Steve doesn’t stop stroking his hair. “You mean Peggy,” he says.

“I think so.” The name sounds familiar, but the details are blurry. “Was she on your team? I don’t remember you having sex with her.”

A quiet, strangled sound falls from Steve’s lips. “Bucky, what exactly do you think being on a team means?”

“Don’t know.” Words are getting difficult again - there have already been so many of them. His eyelids are drooping. “I like your new team, though. They’re…” Warm. Safe. Welcoming. Gentle when they touch him and kind when they talk to him, like he really is something more than a weapon. “They’re nice.”

And whatever Steve says, Bucky knows how ridiculous it is to think he could be one of them. Maybe if he was more like the man Steve knew back then, and less like the desperate, dangerous creature Hydra made him. There’s only so much of their work he can undo. He knows what he’s good for, and he knows what he isn’t. Even now, a part of him is still waiting for the other shoe to drop. For Steve to add that really, he means it - Bucky is a useful asset to the team, a priceless addition to their arsenal. There are still only three spaces on the couch they share. An extra body wouldn’t _fit._

But it’s a nice thought to fall asleep on.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this chapter took...an awful lot longer than I ever in a million years expected it to. My original plans just were not working out. If you're still with me, I'm very sorry and thanks for being patient!

Here’s what progress looks like: there are days when Bucky locks himself in the gym and rips the punching bag clean off its chain in his efforts to blow off steam. There are days when he and Steve go up to the roof of the tower and just sit there, gazing out over the city, swapping memories of what it used to look like. There are days when he prefers not to talk and days when he can hardly stop, and there are also days - normal days now, days too common to remark upon - when he sits with the others in the common room and doesn’t pay attention to the knife left out on the kitchen counter or the proximity of the nearest security camera.

And slowly, in increments almost too small to measure, the claustrophobic space inside his mind starts to expand.

He still thinks a lot about Steve’s words - _you’re part of our team_. Those words mean something to him, something much deeper than the missions he takes with them or the threats he watches for them when their backs are turned. He still doesn’t know the right words to describe the way it makes him feel, but he’s not so sure he _needs_ to any more. It’s enough that he can let things be as they are, can run by Steve’s side when he heads out in the mornings and train with Natasha on Stark’s target range and laugh with Sam over the latest Captain America sightings in the morning paper.

On the days when it’s nowhere near enough - well, he can cope. Can watch them smile together, just the three of them, and feel glad that they’ve got each other to lean on. Can hear them on the nights when they forget how thin the walls are, and dutifully block out the sound beneath the covers. Can wake to the imagined warmth of their touch and bring himself off in fast, guilty strokes with his harsh breathing muffled in his pillow. Can keep his wistful stares to the moments they’re not looking, when they’re all wrapped up in togetherness and his view from the outside is bittersweet.

It all comes together on the night when he wakes up shaking, with a blood-soaked montage of past assignments playing behind his eyelids, and finds himself alone in his bed.

Alone. No hand in his hair, no voice in his ear, no comforting warmth beside him. It is possible, of course, that this is deliberate - that he’s screamed too much and now they’ve all lost interest, turned their backs, blocked out the noise. Their absence is a full-body ache, radiating out from somewhere in his chest. The air tastes thin. His breath is coming in short, frantic gasps. It’s possible that all this is deliberate, but he knows better now than to give into that fear. So he rises. Pads down the hall on unsteady legs, keeps his eyes straight ahead and ignores the horrors that lurk in the darkness.

It’s still hard to breathe when he slips into their room, but the air is softer here. Warmer. Their sleepy scent fills the air and eases the tightness in his lungs.

They don’t wake. They’re tangled together on the bed, all three of them, Sam flat on his back in the middle with one arm curled tight around Natasha and the other trapped awkwardly beneath Steve’s bulky shoulders.

“Bucky? What’s wrong?” Steve’s eyes fly open the moment Bucky taps his shoulder, and Bucky almost gives in to his rising urge to flee - almost.

“Nothing,” he says quickly. Sam and Natasha are beginning to stir now, woken by the sound of Steve’s voice. “Nothing’s wrong, I just...want you to make room for me.” His grimace vanishes in the shadowy darkness, and he gestures awkwardly at the bed.

And that’s all it takes. “Come here,” Steve says at once, and rolls over, shifting closer to the edge of the bed. He nudges Sam, who gives a sleepy grunt and wriggles off in the other direction. With his heart rising in his throat, Bucky crawls into the empty space and lets them close back in around him.

-

Several mornings later, there’s  a new couch in the living room: exactly like the last, but with four spaces instead of three.

It takes time for Bucky to process the significance of this fact. His first and most overwhelming response is alarm, because he knows he’s been sleeping more soundly since he moved into the communal bed, but still - a _couch_. Someone, in the five-hour interval between his falling asleep and waking again, managed to swap out an entire item of bulky household furniture without disturbing him at all. Adrenaline thunders through him as he considers all the possible scenarios: drugged sleep (though he doesn’t feel groggy) or a sensory malfunction that cut off his hearing or a processing malfunction that’s causing him to count the seats incorrectly. He can’t rule out the possibility that the couch has been rigged, or that there’s an intruder still in the building - bypassing security by some unknown means, sabotaging the rest of the furniture - so it’s probably a good thing, in the end, that Natasha yawns as loudly as she does. He knows she’s up before she leaves the bedroom, and doesn’t move to defend when she emerges from the hall behind him and gives his shoulder a friendly squeeze.

“Morning,” she says, and if she’s in any way alarmed by the change in furniture then she doesn’t let on. “Want coffee?”

“Sure,” says Bucky, not taking his eyes off the couch. “Did you…” He pauses, wrestling with the deep-rooted training that tells him not to ask too many questions. “The couch,” he goes on once he’s decided the pang of anxiety is safe to ignore.

Natasha casts a quick glance over at the offending piece of furniture, then back at him with a bright gleam in her eyes that fades when she catches sight of his expression. “Clint helped me move it in last night,” she explains, detecting his discomfort and reading it correctly. “We were very quiet. Wanted to surprise you.”

Bucky isn’t used to people actively trying to surprise him; historically, it hasn’t ended well for them. This time - well, this time the situation is salvageable. Especially when Natasha tugs gently on his arm and says, “Come on. Pick a spot.” He stares at her, trying not to give away how pathetically fast his heart is beating, and from the look on her face he’s not entirely successful. “Do I need to spell it out for you?”

When the others emerge from the room about half an hour later, this is what they find: Bucky lying on his side across all four seats of the couch with his feet to the door and his head in Natasha’s lap, and two cold cups of coffee sitting untouched on the table in front of them. The morning cartoons are playing on the TV, but Bucky’s not watching them and he doesn’t think Natasha is, either.

“What are you guys up to?” says Steve, already turning on the coffee machine and rummaging in the cupboard for a clean mug.

“Spelling some stuff out.” Bucky can’t see Natasha’s face from down here, but he can hear the smugness in her voice as she combs her fingers through his hair.

And he can see the puzzled look Sam shares with Steve before shrugging, sweeping across the room, and pushing ineffectually at Bucky’s legs to try and make room for himself. “Man, it’s all or nothing with you, isn’t it?”

He doesn’t sound upset. Bucky obligingly shifts his legs out of the way, and mumbles his vague assent into Natasha’s lap.

Over in the kitchen, Steve’s face is lighting up.

-

They touch him like his body is something personal, intimate.

It’s the first time in decades that he’s thought of it that way.

“You’re so responsive,” Natasha says happily, as she scrapes her nails down his stomach. He’s boneless on the bed and stripped to the waist, propped back in Sam’s lap with Natasha straddling his legs and Steve nuzzling at the side of his neck, trying dazedly to remember what he’s supposed to do next. There has to be more to it than lying back while they explore, but he’s not sure anything else that happens can possibly feel better than what they’re doing right now. “Figured you’d be more the stoic type, you know?” Her smile is sharp and very nearly predatory. “This is much more fun.”

“We used to have to keep so quiet,” says Steve, the words slightly muffled as he kisses a slow trail down Bucky’s neck. “There was always some nosy neighbour to worry about, or some guy in the tent next to ours. Dunno if you remember, but this one time we nearly had half a platoon walk in on us when they got back early from from a mission -”

“Steve,” says Sam. “This is not a sexy story.” The reprimand is spoiled a bit by the barely-concealed laughter in his voice, and he knots a hand loosely in Bucky’s hair to coax his head back further. “You can reminisce later. Right now we’ve got something better to do.”

“On it.” Steve moves in on Bucky’s exposed throat at the same moment Natasha closes her teeth around his nipple, and Bucky whimpers and immediately relegates the awkward half-memories to the bottom of his priority list.

(Memories, he’s learning, are nothing compared to reality. There’s no other way to explain how _vivid_ everything feels, how every nerve crackles and sparks as he relearns sensations he thought he already remembered.)

Natasha is shifting down his body, hands dancing just above his waistband. She holds his gaze and licks her lips; fragments of memory are jangling again in the back of his mind, turning his thoughts to treacle. Steve’s teeth graze the pulse point under his jaw. Sam tightens fingers in his hair, pulls. Natasha’s hands slip inside his boxers and he used to know how to do this, he thinks, used to know how to _breathe_ -

With her hand stroking him, his mind scatters like dust in the wind. He comes apart quickly - much too quickly, arching and gasping, feeling each pulse of pleasure like an electric shock through his system.

When he falls back, all three of them are there to catch him.

“Easy there,” Steve breathes, his lips brushing the curve of Bucky’s ear. “Just relax, take it easy, get your breath back. We’ve got all the time in the world.”

And Bucky believes, because none of them has ever given him reason not to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come hang out with me on [tumblr](lucymonster.tumblr.com)!


End file.
